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Posted on 07/22/2005 12:02:04 PM PDT by GreenLanternCorps
On her Web site, Danica McKellar, the actress best known as Winnie Cooper on the television series "The Wonder Years," takes on questions that require more than a moment's thought to answer.
"If it takes Sam six minutes to wash a car by himself," one fan asked recently, "and it takes Brian eight minutes to wash a car by himself, how long will it take them to wash a car together?"
"This is a 'rates' problem," Ms. McKellar wrote in reply. "The key is to think about each of their 'car washing rates' and not the 'time' it takes them."
Ms. McKellar, now a semiregular on "The West Wing" playing a White House speechwriter, Elsie Snuffin, is probably the only person on prime-time television who moonlights as a cyberspace math tutor.
Her mathematics knowledge extends well beyond calculus. As a math major at the University of California, Los Angeles, she also took more esoteric classes, the ones with names like "complex analysis" and "real analysis," and she pondered making a career move to professional mathematician.
"I love that stuff," Ms. McKellar said last month during a visit to Manhattan after a play-reading in the Hamptons. Her conversation was peppered with terminology like "epsilons" and "limsups" (pronounced "lim soups").
"I love continuous functions and proving if functions are continuous or not," she said.
She may also be the only actress, now or ever, to prove a new mathematical theorem, one that bears her name. Certainly, she is the only theorem prover who appears wearing black lingerie in the July issue of Stuff magazine. Even in that interview, she mentioned math.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
They're just trying to refurbish the reputation of actors and actresses so we'll all go gaga when they make idiotic political pronouncements.
Obviously if I can do rate problems AND pretend to be another person, then that means I know best how to deal with murderers killing Londoners with bombs.
Beatles covers are almost always bad.
It is possible to restart math and take it to the limit, so to speak. Find an algebra book with lots of problems and answers, and work every problem in the book. This will take some time, but try to do at least one problem a day, or a dozen if there is time, or even more when the problems are really simple. You will find you can handle numbers a lot better as you work the problems. Then get a good, thick analytical geometry and calculus book and repeat. Every problem in the book. That will pretty much do it. Then DiffEq, real analysis, linear, complex analysis, will take some work but won't be all that bad. Statistics will still be highly annoying. Then, you're done and can get into Riemannian space and cosmology if you like. Just do the algebra problems for now. Be advised that most elementary math texts are next to useless, but there are some good ones, so don't despair if the first algebra text you pick up seems crazy.
There is some exposure to proofs at the undergrad level, even in high school. Grad level is almost all proofs.
What kind of car does Sam have, and likewise for Brian. All cars are Not Created Equal.
I would let her work on an equation or two!
Nothing remotely looking like her was ever in any upper level math class I ever took ...
At least an hour and a half.
Correct.
You are definitely more precise, not necessarily more accurate.
I work in construction. If you want to build a bridge that takes 6 weeks with 10 men, you can't necessarily build it in 3 weeks with 20 men.
That might just do the trick. I found that I had no problems completing my homework (often getting 100%), but by the time we got to a quiz on the material, I would mess it all up. I never got to spend enough time mastering the fundamentals. Since to really understand math, you have to be competent in the prior material, well...let's just say it's easy to fall behind in that scenario.
I bought an algebra textbook a couple of years ago, but I've been too sidetracked having babies to sit down and try to learn it. Mr. Ex could help me, easily...he's on par with my uncle, math-wise.
Just don't ask him to spell! LOL
I work in software development. We have a saying that "you can't hire nine women to make a baby in a month."
OK, but I would go with the 3.5 minutes. I like nice round accurate numbers over multi-decimaled precise numbers. Besides, if you want to get mathematically technical, there is only one significant digit in each number, both times being integers, so any precision to the right of the decimal point is bogus.
LOL. I'll see you in prison!
And if she were in one of your classes, what would you have done about it, big boy?
I'm pretty good at math, having breezed through my undergraduate math courses with As. Much of what is in her paper is WAY over my head.
Didn't Kevin and Winnie end up boinking in the final season of Wonder Years? Or am I confusing that show with James at 15?
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